Sundries & Curiosities for the Adventurous. A Tribal Inquiry.

Menu

our shadow side of age

Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.

Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even, living only two out of the three.

Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.

Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.

Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur.

~David Whyte

how we live our days….

inquiry for today~ the other side of aging is wise counsel toward living deeply….

Agency is the sense of being a cause rather than an effect. With agency, you are active rather than passive, taking initiative and directing your life rather than passive, taking initiative and directing your life rather than being swept along. Agency is central to grit, since without it a person can’t mobilize other internal resources for coping. If you’ve been knocked down by life, agency is the first thing you draw on to get up off the floor.

To prevent helplessness, or to gradually unlearn it, look for experiences in which you are making a choice or influencing an outcome. In life, there are times when we step back and take a hard look at something and in a deep and honest way recognize that we need to make a significant change. It could be hard, it could be painful, but we choose the change. This is agency.